indulging a dream-like existence go to Oxford, and stay there; let him study this magnificent spectacle, the same under all aspects, with the mental twilight tempering the glare of noon, or mellowing the silver moonlight; let him not catch the din of scholars or teachers, or dine or sup with them, or speak a word to any of its privileged inhabitants; for if he does, the spell will be broken, the poetry and the religion gone, and the palace of enchantment will melt from his embrace into thin air!” HAZLITT. “Oxford ... must remain its own sole expression; and those whose sad fortune it may be never to behold it have no better resource than to dream about grey, weather-stained, ivy-grown edifices, wrought with quaint Gothic ornament, and standing around grassy quadrangles, where cloistered walks have echoed to the quiet footsteps of twenty generations,--lawns and gardens of luxurious repose, shadowed with canopies of foliage, and lit up with sunny glimpses through archways of great boughs,--spires, towers, and turrets, each with its history and legend,--dimly magnificent chapels, with painted windows of rare beauty and brilliantly diversified hues, creating an atmosphere of richest gloom,--vast college halls, high-windowed, oaken-panelled, and hung around with portraits of the men in every age whom the University has nurtured to be illustrious,--long vistas of alcoved libraries, where the wisdom and learned folly of all time is shelved,--kitchens (we throw in this feature by way of ballast, and because it would not be English Oxford without its beef and beer) with huge fireplaces, capable of roasting a hundred joints at once,--and cavernous cellars, where rows of piled-up hogsheads seethe and fume with that mighty malt-liquor which is the true milk of Alma Mater: make all these things vivid in your dream, and you will never know nor believe how inadequate is the result to represent even the merest outside of Oxford.”--HAWTHORNE. “Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! There are our young barbarians, all at play!